E3 2012: The Dirty World of Star Wars 1313

Dave Thier
, ContributorI write about video games and technology.Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

There is no Force. There are no Jedi. There’s a giant pit, a box with a monster and some shabby looking mercenaries out to kill you. This is the world of Star Wars 1313.

We got our first hints of LucasArts’ new bounty hunter game last week, and now that we’re in the thick of E3, we’re getting a chance to see how the first mature title from the Star Wars Universe is shaping up. It’s shaping up well.

Star Wars 1313 is being built by professionals across the LucasArts universe – not just programmers who have worked on games, but animators and motion-capture specialists from Industrial Light and Magic and other film divisions. If they want a game that looks like a movie, it makes sense to get people who make movies involved.

The game looks like Uncharted – we were seeing a test character rather than the real protagonist – but the odds of going through this title without a gruff, cocky hero with a healthy disrespect for the law are exactly zero. In the demo, our heroes are besieged by a group of mercenaries on their way down to Coruscant’s eponymous level 1313. They blast their way through the mercenaries, blow up two ships and jump between the plummeting wreckage. It’s uncharted on the level of Star Wars – everything is that much more fantastic.

The blaster was the workhorse of this demo, but the player also spent some time firing what looked like a shockwave to knock enemies back or, in one case, out of the ship.

I haven’t been excited about Star Wars for years – the new trilogy did a lot to dampen my enthusiasm, and nothing in recent years has brought it back. But this is the Star Wars I’ve always loved – not the clean, grandiose Star Wars of Jedi and Sith, but a dirty world full of charming criminals. This is Han Solo’s Star Wars, and I want to play.